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Address by 

DANIEL DAVENPORT 

Bridgeport, Conn. 



THE 
TWO HUNDREDTH 

ANNIVERSARY 

OF THE SETTLEMENT OF THE TOWN OF 

NEW MILFORD, CONN. 

June 17th, 1907. 




ADDRESS 

DELIVERED BY 

DANIEL DAVENPORT, 

Of Bridgeport, Conn. 



Press of 

The Buckingham, Brewer & Piatt Co. 

Bridgeport, Conn. 



f/of 




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<• ■ ,- 



ADDRESS 

DELIVERED AT NEW MILFORD, CONN., JUNE 17TH, 1907, 
BY DANIEL DAVENPORT OF BRIDGEPORT, CONN., 
ON THE TWO HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY 
OF THE SETTLEMENT OF THE TOWN. 



The settlement of New Milford began in 1707, exactly a 
century after that of Jamestown, Va. At that time, although 
Milford and Stratford at the mouth of the Housatonic had 
been settled almost seventy years, and the river afiforded a 
convenient highway into the interior, for much of the dis- 
tance, this place, only thirty miles from the north shore of 
Long Island Sound, was still beyond the extreme northwest- 
ern frontier of New England, and indeed of English North 

f 

America. 

The inhabitants of Connecticut then numbered about 
fifteen thousand, settled in thirty towns, mostly along the 
shore of Long Island Sound, and upon the banks of the Con- 
necticut and Thames Rivers. During the thirty years next 
before, a few families from Norwalk had settled at Danbury, 
from Stratford at Woodbury, from Milford at Derby, and 
from Farmington at Waterbury. With these exceptions, 
hardly more than pin points upon the map, and a few settle- 
ments about Albany, N. Y., the whole of western and north- 
western Connecticut and of western Massachusetts and 
northern New York was a savage wilderness, covered with 
dense forests, and aflfording almost perfect concealment for 
the operations of savage warfare. 

Though the northwestern portion of Connecticut was 
then a most formidable and inhospitable wilderness, strenuous 
efforts were already being put forth by the Colony to encour- 
age its settlement. For, strange as it seems to us now, at that 
time, owing to imperfect modes of cultivation and the diffi- 
culty of subduing the wilderness, the settled portions of the 
Commonwealth had begun to feel overpopulated. Twenty- 
five years before, the Secretary of the Colony had reported 
to the Home Government, that "in this mountainous, rocky 



and swampy province" most of the arable land was taken up, 
and the remainder was hardly worth tillage 

This need of more land, and the protection from invasion 
which the settlement of this section would afford the commu- 
nities near the coast, and the innate love of adventure and de- 
sire to subdue the wilderness which have characterized the 
American people from the beginning, were the impelling 
causes which led to the planting of New Milford. 

So pressing did this movement become that, though what 
is now Litchfield County was then as remote and inaccessible 
to the rest of the Colony, as were Indiana and Illinois to our 
fathers in the middle of the last century, within forty-five 
years after the first settler had built his log cabin and lighted 
his fire here, twelve towns had been settled and the county 
organized with a population of more than ten thousand. 

In order that we may appreciate, somewhat, the broader 
political conditions under which the first settlers took up their 
abode here, which largely engrossed their thoughts and vitally 
affected them and their children for two generations, it is 
necessary, before taking up the narrative of their actual settle- 
ment here, to advert briefly to the state of affairs at that time 
in England, and on the continent of Europe, and in the Eng- 
lish, French and Spanish Colonies of North America. 

By 1707, it had become apparent to the people of Connec- 
ticut that, soon or late, they must fight for the very existence 
of their chartered privileges and natural rights, not alone the 
British Crown, but the English people. The disposition of 
the people of England to reap where they had not sown had 
become very clear. In April, 1701, Connecticut was named in 
the bill then introduced in Parliament to abrogate all Ameri- 
can charters. She resisted with all her might through her 
agent, but it passed the second reading, and would have be- 
come a law but for the breaking out of the French War. Its 
principle was supported by the mercantile interests and the 
great men of England. Then for the first time the people of 
Connecticut fully realized that their foes were to be, not the 
exiled house of Stuart, but the English people themselves, 
and that though they changed their dynasties they did not 
change their own nature. 

In 1707, the principal kingdoms of Europe and their colo- 
nies were ablaze with war. Anne was Oueen of Ensfland. 



In that very year she attached her signature to that long 
projected and most important constitutional arrangement, 
the Act of Union between England and Scotland, which made 
them one kingdom, the crown of which, by the Act of Settle- 
ment passed a few years before, had been forever vested in 
the person and heirs of Sophia, the electress of Hanover, the 
present reigning dynasty. Anne's accession to the throne in 
1702 had been followed by the acknowledgement, by Louis 
XIV, of the son of James II, the deposed and fugitive king of 
England and the determined foe of the rights of the Colonists, 
as the rightful king, although in the Treaty of Ryswick, in 
1697, he had solemnly stipulated to the contrary. This act of 
perfidy roused the English to fury. The primary cause of the 
war, then raging, was the acceptance by Louis of the crown of 
Spain for his grandson Philip despite a previous formal 
renunciation. But the immediate occasion was his espousal 
of the cause of the son of James II as pretender to the British 
throne, which enabled the English Government to form a 
great European alliance to wrest Spain from Philip and 
prevent Louis from becoming the absolute master of Europe. 

The year before, 1706, had witnessed the humbling of the 
pride and ambition of Louis by the defeat of his armies, at 
Ramillies by the Duke of Marlborough, in Piedmont by 
Prince Eugene, and in Spain by Lord Galway. Charles XII of 
Sweden had advanced to Dresden in Saxony, an English and 
Portuguese army had occupied Madrid, and an attack of the 
combined fleets of Spain and France upon Charlestown, S. C, 
then claimed by Spain as a part of Florida, had been repulsed 
by the vigor and martial skill of the Colonial authorities. 

At that time, the valley of the St. Lawrence was occupied 
by about fifty thousand French settlers, imbued with bitter 
hostility towards the settlers in New England and New York. 
Already the vast design of LaSalle to acquire for the King of 
France the whole interior of the Continent seemed to have 
been accomplished. While as yet the English were struggling 
to secure a foothold upon the Atlantic seaboard, the French 
had explored the Mississippi and its tributaries to its mouth, 
and the whole vast region drained by them, between the Alle- 
ghanies and the Rockies, had been taken possession of by the 
French under the name of Louisiana, and a chain of military 
and trading posts from New Orleans to the St. Lawrence, ad- 



mirably chosen for the purpose, had been established to hold 
it, and another chain was already planned to extend south- 
ward along the west side of the Alleghanies, to forever keep 
out the English. The French had been for fifty years hound- 
ing on the numerous tribes of Canada and northern New Eng- 
land to attack and exterminate the settlers of New England. 
The conquest of Canada by the English was therefore an ob- 
ject of the greatest political importance, and necessary for the 
peace and safety of the colonies, and their future growth, and 
it continued to engross the efforts and exhaust the means of 
the colonists, until their purpose was finally accomplished in 
1763. 

The people who settled here were entirely familiar with 
the hardships, dangers and horrors of Indian warfare to which 
they were liable in taking up their abode on this frontier. The 
horrible incidents which attended the massacre of the inhabi- 
tants of Schenectady, in 1690, seventeen years before, during 
the previous war, and of the inhabitants of Deerfield. Mass., 
and other places in 1704, during the war still raging, were 
household words throughout Connecticut, and had left an 
abiding imprint in the minds of the people on the border. 
Though the Indians, right about them here, seem to have been 
few in number and comparatively harmless, they knew from 
their own and their fathers' experience, that their position was 
one of extreme danger, and that at all times their scanty and 
hardwon possessions and their lives were liable to instant de- 
struction, from unheralded irruptions by the more distant 
Indian tribes of the North and Northwest, urged on by their 
French instigators and allies. For the experience of the last 
seventy years, from the time of the Pequot War, and during 
the subsequent troubles with the tribes in southwestern Con- 
necticut, and on Long Island, and during King Philip's War, 
had fully taught them the craft, treachery and pitiless cruelty 
of the savages, as well as their capacity for extensive combina- 
tion among widely separated tribes. 

When Major DeRouville, in 1704, with his band of civil- 
ized and uncivilized savages, committed the atrocities at Deer- 
field, Mass., the suspicion of the Colonists that the French had 
instigated the former Indian outrages became a certainty, for 
in this instance they openly shared in them. Their object was, 
as I have said, to drive the English Colonists from North 



America, and substitute in their place their own colonial 
system. For this purpose they fitted out hundreds of parties 
of savages to proceed to other portions of the English settle- 
ments, shoot down the settlers when at work at their crops, 
seize their wives and children, load them with packs of 
plunder from their own homes, and drive them before them 
into the wilderness. When no longer able to stagger under 
their burdens, they were murdered, and their scalps torn off, 
and exhibited to their masters, and for such trophies bounties 
were paid. The French government in Paris paid bounties 
for the scalps of women and children, as Connecticut did for 
those of wolves, and it not only fitted out other savage expedi- 
tions, but sent its own soldiers to assist in the murderous 
work. Detailed reports of each case were regularly made to 
the government at Paris by its agents in Canada which can 
now be read. This is true of every French and Indian war 
until 1763, and the fact was as well known to the settlers here 
in 1707, as it is to the historical investigator of to-day. 

In the beginning of 1707, reports of an expedition by the 
French and Indians against some part of New England gave 
alarm to the Colony, and on the 6th of February of that year 
a council of war was convened at Hartford, consisting of the 
Governor, most of the Council, and many of the chief military 
officers of the colony. Suspicions were entertained that the 
attack would fall upon western Connecticut, and that the 
Indians in this vicinity intended to join the French and 
Indians. The Council of War determined that the then 
western frontier towns, Danbury, Woodbury, Waterbury and 
Simsbury, should be fortified with the utmost expedition. 
They were directed to keep scouts of faithful men to range the 
forests to discover the designs of the enemy, and give intelli- 
gence should they make their appearance near the frontier. 
At the October session in 1708, it was enacted that garrisons 
should be kept at those towns, and so it continued until after 
the close of the war in 1713. 

It was in the midst of alarms and dangers such as these 
that the settlement of this town was begun. One of the first 
houses constructed here had palisades about it to serve as a 
fort, which lasted many years, and in 1717 soldiers were 
stationed here for the protection of the inhabitants, and this 
was repeated several times afterwards. Every man was a 



soldier. He was a soldier when he sat at his meals, a soldier 
when he stood in his door, a soldier when he went to the 
cornfield, a soldier by day and by night. 

At the time the first settlers arrived here there was a 
tract of cleared land on the west side of the river called the 
Indian Field. It extended from where the river runs in an 
easterly direction south to the mouth of the little brook which 
runs along Fort Hill. It was not included in the original pur- 
chase from the Indians, having been reserved by them in their 
deed. It was, however, purchased from them in 1705, by John 
Mitchell, and was conveyed by him to the inhabitants of the 
town in 1714. This was of the greatest advantage to the first 
settlers. It furnished them a space of cleared ground, where 
each planter could at once plant his corn and other crops, 
without the delay of felling the trees. 

It is thought also that the ground where we now stand, 
and Aspetuck Hill had been in a large measure cleared of 
trees by the Indians by burning, as was also Grassy Hill, two 
miles east of here. There appears also to have been some 
meadow land partially cleared at the mouth of the Aspetuck 
River. 

At that time the country about here presented no such 
appearance as it does now. The river then flowed with a 
fuller tide. With the exceptions I have noted, a continuous 
forest overspread the whole landscape. No thickets, however, 
choked up the ways through it, for the underbrush was swept 
away every year by fires built by the Indians for that purpose. 
Winding footways led here and there which the Indians and 
wild beasts followed. The roots of the smaller grasses were 
destroyed by this annual burning over. A coarse long grass 
grew along the low banks of the river and wherever the 
ground was not thickly shaded by trees. After the occupation 
of the country by the white settlers this annual burning was 
prohibited. In lieu thereof, the General Court early^ in its 
history enacted that every inhabitant, with a few exceptions, 
should devote a certain time yearly, in the several plantations, 
to the cutting of brush and small trees in the more open 
forests for the purpose of allowing grass to grow in such 
places, as during the summer the cattle ranged through the 
forests near the plantations subsisting on what grew there. 
It is said that in the early settlement of this town, all meadow 

8 



land was secured by clearing marshy or swampy ground and 
allowing it to grow up with grass from the roots and seeds 
already in the soil. It was one of the early difficulties in the 
Colony to secure grass, from want of grass seed. 

The forests about here abounded with bears, wolves, 
foxes and catamounts, deer and moose, wild turkeys, pigeons, 
quail and partridges, and the waters with wild geese, ducks, 
herons and cranes. The river itself was alive with fish and 
every spring great quantities of shad and lamprey eels ascend- 
ed it. Strawberries, blackberries and huckleberries were ex- 
tremely abundant in their season. 

The winters were usually of great severity. In 1637 the 
snow lay on the ground three feet deep all over New England 
from the third of November until the 23rd of March and on 
the 23rd of April it snowed for several hours in Boston, the 
flakes being as large as shillings. The springs were very 
backward, the summers extremely hot and often dry. 

Upon the petition of the people in Milford, in May, 1702, 
the General Assembly granted them liberty to purchase from 
the Indians a township at Wyantonock, the Indian name of 
this place, and directed them to report their doings to the 
Assembly. The next March they made an extensive purchase 
of the natives, and a patent for the same was granted by the 
Assembly. In October, 1704, the Legislature enacted that the 
tract so purchased should be a township by the name of New 
Milford, and that it must be settled in five years,— the town 
plat to be fixed by a committee appointed by the General As- 
sembly. In October, 1706, the Legislature annexed the tract 
to New Haven County. In April, 1706, the first meeting of 
the proprietors was held at Milford, and it was voted that the 
town plat and home lots should be speedily pitched and laid 
out by the committee appointed by the Legislature, according 
to its own best judgment, following certain rules laid down by 
the proprietors. During that year and according to those 
rules, the town plat was laid out. 

It was originally intended to lay out the settlement on the 
hill immediately east of the present village, from this circum- 
stance called Town Hill to this day. In point of fact, it was 
laid out on Aspetuck Hill, and consisted of the town street 
and sixteen home lots. The street was twenty rods wide. It 
began at the south end of the brow of the hill, or at the lower 



end of what was then called the "Plain on the Hill" and 
extended northward. Eight lots were laid out on each side of 
this street, each lot being twenty-one rods wide and sixty 

deep. 

By the rules adopted by the proprietors, these lots were to 
be taken up successively in regular order by the settlers as 
they should arrive. John Noble took the first lot on the east 
side of the street at the lower end, he being the first settler to 
arrive. John Bostwick took the lot on the opposite side of the 
street, he being the next settler on the ground. This method 
was followed by others until there were twelve settlers with 
their families, numbering seventy souls located on this street 
in 1712. Of these twelve families, four were from Northamp- 
ton and Westfield, Mass., four were from Stratford, two from 
P'armington, and only two from Milford. In 1714, the town 
street was extended southward to the south end of the present 
public green. 

The first houses constructed here by the settlers were of 
the rudest description. They were built of logs fastened by 
notching at the corners. They were usually from fifteen to 
eighteen feet square, and about seven feet in height, or high 
enough for a tall man to enter. At first they had no floors. 
The fireplace was erected at one end by making a back of 
stones laid in mud and not in mortar, and a hole was left in the 
bark or slab roof for the escape of the smoke. A chimney of 
sticks plastered with mud, was afterwards erected in this 
opening. A space, of width suitable for a door, was cut in one 
side and this was closed, at first, by hanging in it a blanket, 
and afterwards by a door made from split planks and hung on 
wooden hinges. This door was fastened by a wooden latch on 
the inside, which could be raised from the outside by a string. 
When the string was pulled in the door was effectually fasten- 
ed. A hole was cut in each side of the house to let in light, 
and, as glass was difficult to obtain, greased paper was used 
to keep out the storms and cold of Autumn and Winter. 
Holes were bored at the proper height in the logs at one 
corner of the room, and into these ends of poles were fitted 
the opposite ends, where they crossed, being supported by a 
crotch or a block of the proper height. Across these poles 
others were laid, and these were covered by a thick mattress 
of hemlock boughs, over which blankets were spread. On 

10 



such beds as these the first inhabitants of this town slept and 
their first children were born. For want of chairs, rude seats 
were made with axe and auger by boring holes and inserting 
legs in planks split from basswood logs, hewn smooth on one 
side. Tables were made in the same way, and after a time, 
the floor, a bare space being left about the fireplace instead of 
a hearthstone. 

No sooner had the first settlers taken up their abode here 
than they were called upon to defend the title to their lands in 
the courts of the Colony. About thirty-seven years before, the 
General Court had granted permission to certain Stratford 
parties to buy land from the Indians and settle a plantation at 
this place, and they had bought over twenty-six thousand 
acres hereabouts. Apparently, however, no attempt was made 
towards a settlement of the same until after the purchase of 
same tract from the Indians by the Milford parties in 1702, 
and the grant for a patent for the same to them by the General 
Court in 1703. Soon after the settlers first broke ground here 
in 1707, a suit was begun against them by the Stratford people 
in the County Court at New Haven in May, 1708, and it was 
carried thence to the General Court. It was tried sixteen 
times. The first fifteen times, the plaintiffs won on the 
strength of their Indian title. The sixteenth, the defendants 
won on the strength of their Indian title, the patent from the 
General Court, and occupation. This incident is particularly 
interesting because one of the plaintiffs and the lawyer in this 
great case was the famous John Read, one of the ablest men 
and most remarkable characters which New England has pro- 
duced. Some notice of him will not be inappropriate here, as 
he was one of the earliest inhabitants of this place. 

He was born at Fairfield, June 29th, 1679, and was a 
brother-in-law of Governor Talcott. He graduated at Har- 
vard in 1697, became a minister, preached in Woodbury as a 
candidate, and in various towns in Hartford and Fairfield 
Counties and preached the first sermon ever delivered in this 
place. He studied law, and when in 1708 the General Assem- 
bly first provided for the appointment of attorneys as officers 
of the Court, he was one of the first admitted. He held the 
offices of Colony Queen's Attorney, 1712-16, Deputy for Nor- 
walk, 1715-17, Commissioner to settle the boundary with New 
York 1719, and he was Connecticut's representative in the 

11 



Inter-Colonial Commission in regard to Bills of Credit, in 
1720. He removed to Boston in 1722, and became the Attor- 
ney General and a member of the Council of Massachusetts. 
He was by far the most eminent lawyer in New England, and 
was called "the Pride of the Bar, Light of the Law, and Chief 
among the Wise, Witty and Eloquent." It was he who pre- 
pared the instructions to Lord Mansfield, the counsel for Con- 
necticut in the great case of Clark vs. Tousey, in which was 
discussed the question whether the Common Law of England 
had any force in Connecticut other than as it was adopted by 
the people of Connecticut. His exposition of the principles 
involved was most masterly, and it was the great authority 
upon which in a later generation the people of Connecticut 
relied to sustain them in their opposition to the measures of 
the crown in 1775. 

In a centenary sermon delivered at Danbury in January, 
1801, the Rev. Thomas Robbins had this to say of him, "One 
of the early inhabitants of Danbury was John Read, a man of 
great talents and thoroughly skilled in the knowledge and 
practice of the law. He possessed naturally many peculiari- 
ties and afifected still more. He is known to this day through 
the country by many singular anecdotes and characteristics 
under the appellation of 'Joh" Read, the Lawyer.' " 

In 1712, the town was incorporated, which gave it the 
power to tax the inhabitants to support a minister, and the 
place became thereby an ecclesiastical society. In March, 
1712, the Rev. Daniel Boardman was called to preach to the 
settlers. In May, 1715, the settlers petitioned the General 
Assembly that they might obtain liberty for the settlement of 
the worship and ordinances of God among them, and the Leg- 
islature granted them liberty to embody in church estate as 
soon as God in his providence should make way therefor. On 
November 21st, 1716, Mr. Boardman was duly ordained as 
the pastor of the church of Christ in New Milford, the total 
number of inhabitants of the town then being one hundred 
and twenty-five. The first vote of the town to build a meeting 
house was passed in 1716, but work was not commenced upon 
it until 1719, and it was not completed until 1731, after infinite 
struggling. It was forty feet long, thirty wide and twenty 
feet in height between joints and was provided with galleries, 
pews and a pulpit. Long before completion, when it was first 



used for religious purposes, the congregation was accustomed 
to sit upon its outer sills, which were able to accommodate 
every man, woman and child in the town with a little 
squeezing. In 1713, the town voted to build for the minister 
a dwelling house forty feet long, twenty-one wide, two storie^5 
high, and fourteen feet between joints. In 1726, thirteen yearf. 
later, the house was still unfinished. The first Sabbath day 
house was not built until 1745. 

In 1721, when there were but thirty-five families residing 
here, a public school was ordered by the town to be kept for 
four months the winter following, one-half of the expense to 
be borne by the town. The children were taught reading, 
spelling after a phonetic fashion, writing, and the first four 
rules of arithmetic. In 1725, it was voted to build a school- 
house twenty feet long, sixteen feet wide, and seven feet be- 
tween the joints. 

The first settlers crossed the Housatonic to their lands on 
the west side by fording it at a point near the mouth of Rocky 
River, about a mile above the settlement, or at Waunnupee 
Island in times of very low water. In 1720 the town built a 
boat for the purpose, which was used until 1737 when the first 
bridge ever built across the Housatonic from its source to its 
mouth was constructed at what is now the foot of Bennett 
Street. 

The settlers for many years crushed their grain by hand 
in mortars or carried it to mill at Danbury, Woodbury, or 
Derby, and brought bad: the flour and meal. In 1717, John 
Griswold, under an arrangement with the town, built a grist 
and sawmill on Still River, at what is now Lanesville. 

It is said that in 1713, there was but one clothier in the 
colony. The most that he could do was to full the cloth 
which was made in the homes. A great proportion of it was 
worn without shearing or pressing. He lived at Woodbury, 
and thither the early inhabitants of this town resorted to have 
their cloth fulled. People, to a very large extent, wore cloth- 
ing made from the skins of animals. They also wore wooden 
shoes and moccasins, or went barefoot, although leather boots 
and shoes were sometimes used. 

The implements which they used in subduing the wilder- 
ness, their axes, saws, plows, hoes and scythes were of the 
rudest description. Their horses, cattle, sheep and swine we 

13 



should now regard as of very inferior quality. The same was 
true of the few vegetables they cultivated, and of their fruits, 
especially their apples. Turnips, squashes and beans were 
the principal vegetables. Potatoes were not as yet cultivated 
in New England, onions were not generally, and tomatoes 
were looked upon as poisonous. Some of them owned negro 
slaves but worked the harder themselves to make them work. 
They had little or no currency, taxes and debts being paid 
in produce. What they ate, what they wore, what they coaxed 
from the reluctant soil of these hillsides, cost them infinite 
labor. As was to be expected, a stingy avarice was their be- 
setting sin, which manifested itself in all the relations of life. 
They were without newspapers, none being published in the 
Colony until 1755. They had few books, the first printing 
press in the Colony not having been set up in New London 
until 1709. They suffered greatly from malaria and other 
forms of sickness, as did all the early settlers in the State. 
Medical treatment was poor and difficult to obtain. The 
women went to the limit in childbearing, and the burden of 
rearing their large families was awful. The art of cooking 
v/as little understood. They had no stoves or table forks. The 
food was served in a very unsavory fashion, and was very 
indigestible. The people therefore had frightful dreams, and 
dyspepsia was very prevalent. No carpet was seen here for a 
hundred years after the settlement. Communication with the 
outer world was slow, difficult and rare. On several occa- 
sions, owing to the failure of their crops and the difficulty in 
getting relief from distant places little better off, they nearly 
starved to death. 

Truly the task which they had undertaken to subdue this 
wilderness, to plant here the civil, religious and educational 
institutions of Connecticut, and to prepare this beautiful heri- 
tage for their children and children's children, was no holiday 
pastime, no gainful speculation, no romantic adventure. It 
was grim, persistent, weary toil and danger, continued 
through many years, with the wolf at the door and the savage 
in the neighboring thicket. 

Beside the physical evils with which they were beset, they 
had spiritual troubles also. They fully believed in witchcraft 
as did all their contemporaries, in a personal devil who was 
busily plotting the ruin of their souls, in an everlasting hell of 

14 



literal fire and brimstone, and in a Divine election, by which 
most of them had been irrevocably doomed from before the 
creation of the world to eternal perdition, from which nothing 
which they could do, or were willing to do, could help to res- 
cue them. The great object of life to them, therefore, was to 
try to find out what their future state would be. Said one of 
their preachers, "It is tough work and a wonderful hard 
matter to be saved. 'Tis a thousand to one, if ever thou be 
one of that small number whom God hath picked out to escape 
this wrath to come." That we may get a touch of reality from 
those far off days, let me quote you a few lines from the 
saintly Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, and long 
the model for her preachers. "Suppose any soul here present 
were to behold the damned in hell, and if the Lord should give 
thee a peephole into hell, that thou didst see the horror of those 
damned souls, and th)'- heart begins to shake in consideration 
thereof; then propound this to thy own heart, what pains the 
damned in hell do endure for sin, and thy heart will shake and 
quake at it. The least sin that thou didst ever commit, though 
thou makest a light matter of it, is a greater evil than the 
pains of the damned in hell, setting aside their sins. All the 
torments in hell are not so great an evil as the least sin is ; 
men begin to shrink at this, and loathe to go down to hell and 
be in endless torment." 

The only test they were taught to apply to ascertain 
whether they were predestined to suffer or escape this fearful 
doom, was in their ability and willingness to conform their 
wills to the will of God as revealed in the Bible. Accordingly 
as they had succeeded in this, they had a reasonable assurance 
as to their fate, although no wile of the devil was more fre- 
quent than to falsely persuade men that their prospects were 
favorable. To study the scriptures day and night to ascertain 
the will of God, and to struggle without ceasing to conform 
their wills to his as therein revealed, was therefore the great 
object of existence for them, not that they could thereby alter 
in the least their future state, but that they might, if possible, 
find out what it was likely to be. 

Should this recital of their beliefs provoke a smile, our 
amusement will soon be checked by the thought of the little 
progress which has been made in the last two hundred years, 
towards solving the same problem. The origin of evil, the 

15 



ineradicable tendency of the human heart to sin and do evil, 
the mournful spectacle of ruin and desolation in the moral 
world, and the future life are the same inscrutable mysteries 
to us as to them. If we have constructed or adopted a more 
comfortable theology, it is probably because we are less logical 
than they. It is perhaps because we have forgotten or refused 
to look at some things at which they did not blink. 

Then, too, the Lord was abroad in those days. Their 
thoughts were deeply tinged by the semi-pagan views with 
which the authors of both the Old and New Testaments were 
imbued. When the thunder crashed, it was the voice of an 
angry God that spoke. When the lightning flashed, it was the 
gleam of His angry eye. Benjamin Franklin was then but 
a year old, and electricity had not become the packhorse of 
the world. The smiles and frowns of nature in all her varying 
moods through all the days and seasons, which we ascribe to 
the operations of law, were to them the visible tokens of the 
wrath or favor of the Almighty. On December nth, 1719, 
for the first time in the history of the Colony, the northern 
lights were seen here. They shone with the greatest bril- 
liancy. The consternation they caused was fearful. The 
people had never heard of such a phenomenon. They consid- 
ered it the opening scene of the day of judgment. All amuse- 
ments were given up, all business was forsaken, and sleep 
itself was interrupted for days. Again, on the 29th of October, 
1727, a mighty earthquake occurred, which shook with tre- 
mendous violence the whole Atlantic seaboard. The people 
here believed that the Lord was about to swallow them up in 
His fierce anger. The women throughout New England 
immediately discontinued the wearing of hoop skirts then re- 
cently come into fashion, believing that the earthquake was 
the sign of the Lord's displeasure at the sinful innovation. 

Hardly had the first settlers here begun to build perma- 
nent homes for the living, when they were called upon to 
provide resting places for the dead. The first person to be 
buried in yonder burying ground was a child, a girl, Mary, the 
daughter of Benjamin Bostwick. The next was John Noble, 
the first settler, and the first Town Clerk. He died August 
17th, 1714. The town formally laid out the burying ground 
in 1716. Within fifty years three hundred had gone to rest 
there. 



16 



There were no religious exercises at the funerals, neither 
singing, praying, preaching, or reading of the scriptures. This 
was by way of revolt from former superstitious practices. 
The friends gathered, condoled with the afiflicted ones, sat 
around a while and then the corpse was taken to the burying 
ground. After that the party returned to the house of the 
deceased, where much eating and drinking was indulged in, 
and if the weather permitted, outdoor games and horse races 
were in order. The next Sabbath an appropriate funeral 
sermon was preached. A bereaved husband or wife usually 
soon married again. 

The meeting house was never heated, but the people, 
summoned by drum beat, attended it every Sabbath, morning 
and afternoon, even in the severest weather, although no 
Sabbath day house was erected here until 1745. 

The sacramental bread often froze upon the communion 
plate, as did the ink in the minister's study. The people 
worked their minister very hard, as was the case in all early 
New England communities. They went to church not so 
much because they had to as because they wanted to. Church- 
going was their principal recreation. They demanded long 
prayers and two long sermons each Sabbath from their minis- 
ter, usually on doctrinal points, which they acutely criticised. 
Services began at nine o'clock in the forenoon, and continued 
until five in the afternoon with an hour's intermission. 
Soldiers, fully armed, were always in attendance throughout 
the services ready to repel any attack upon the settlement. 

It should be added, however, that with all their strictness 
in Sabbath keeping and catechising, in family and church 
discipline, there was great license in those days in speech and 
manner, much hard drinking, and rude merrymaking, due to 
their rough form of living. They were not what they wanted 
to be, nor what a loyal posterity perhaps longs to believe 
them. They had red blood in their veins. They were among 
the most enterprising men of their generation. They were 
backwoodsmen, the vanguard of that wonderful race which in 
two hundred years pushed westward the frontier from this 
place to the Pacific, fighting with man and beast the whole 
way, and sowed the land with vigorous sons and daughters. 

The congregational singing in those days must have been 
an interesting performance. When the first settlers came to 

ir 



New England from the old country, they brought with them a 
few tunes to which they sang all the psalms and hymns. The 
proper mode of rendering these was through the nose. With 
the lapse of time and the advent of a new generation, these 
tunes became jangled together in inextricable confusion. The 
practice was for a deacon as leader to read a line of the psalm 
or hymn, and the congregation sang at it as best they could, 
each one using such tune as he chose, and often sliding from 
one tune to another in the same line or improvising as he 
went on. Finally, in 1721, the Rev. Thomas Walter of Rox- 
bury, Mass., published a treatise, upon the grounds or rules of 
music or an introduction to the art of singing by rote, contain- 
ing twenty-four tunes harmonized into three parts. The 
attempt to supersede the old Puritan tunes and restrict the 
liberty of the individual singers met with the greatest opposi- 
tion and was long successfully resisted in all the churches in 
New England, so tenacious were they of the rights of the indi- 
vidual singer. It caused great dissension in the church at this 
place. Finally, in February, 1740, the church voted to half 
the time for the next year, singing the old way one Sabbath 
and the new way the next, and in 1741, at a meeting specially 
called to settle the matter, it was voted thirty to sixteen to 
sing thereafter after the new way. 

No musical instruments were allowed in the meeting- 
house. They had never seen or heard a church organ. But 
they knew that their fathers likened its sound to the bellowing 
of a bull, the grunting of a pig, and the barking of a dog, and 
had resisted its use in religious services even to the shedding 
of blood. Nor were flowers allowed in the church. 

In those days in New England women were not thought 
to have minds worth educating, and they were brought up in 
extreme illiteracy. Nevertheless, their natural wit, brightness, 
and good sense made them very agreeable companions of the 
superior sex. And their influence over their husbands, sons 
and brothers, was quite as great as that of their more cultiva- 
ted daughters of the present day. The refining, educating, 
stimulating influence of the women had much to do in with- 
standing the tendency back to barbarism, which life in an iso- 
lated and new community led to. The debt which is owed to 
them is incalculable. 

As the descendants of those people assemble here to-day 



18 



after the lapse of two hundred years, to commemorate their 
work and rejoice in all the strength, beauty and order, now 
smiling around us in peace and plenty, which have grown out 
of what they began, and as we look back upon their condition, 
trials and experiences, we are apt to imagine that their lot, 
contrasted with our own, was an unhappy one. Nothing could 
be further from the truth. They were a brave, hardy, thrifty, 
frugal, industrious and most capable people. Man for man 
and woman for woman, they were probably superior to those 
here to-day in faculty, and in the capacity for healthy enjoy- 
ments. Their whole previous lives had inured them to their 
experiences. They were the sons and grandsons of the 
original pioneers of New England, and they had been born 
and reared in rude settlements. They never indulged the 
delusion that this region was a land flowing with milk and 
honey. Before they came they knew that they were to wrest 
their living from an uncongenial soil, to struggle with penury 
and to conquer only b}^ constant toil and self-denying thrift. 
The forest would supply them with the materials for shelter 
and fuel and to some extent with food and clothing. All the 
rest must depend upon their own exertions. There was a 
pleasure in facing and overcoming the perils and difficulties 
which they encountered, which those, more delicately reared 
who now live here can never know. Their individual help- 
lessness in the face of appalling obstacles to be met, but bound 
them closer together in mutual helpfulness. Accordingly we 
find that their social faculties were highl)^ developed. It may 
well be doubted whether the sum total of human pleasure 
among the whole five thousand inhabitants of the town to-day 
is any greater than it was among the few hundred who settled 
it. Probably our own superabundance of good things has 
actually lessened our capacity to enjoy, in comparison with 
theirs. Their simple tastes and homely joys amid their rude 
surroundings were probably more productive of positive 
pleasure and real happiness, than all the refinement and 
culture of our twentieth century civilization. 

It would be a pleasing and instructive task to trace the 
progress of this old town, from those rude beginnings to its 
present strength and wealth. But the limits of the time and 
subject allotted to me on this occasion forbid. It is the 
product of the labors of eight generations, who now sleep 

19 



beneath its soil. They never could have foreseen the present. 
They never knew or thought of us. Each generation was 
busy with its own problems, tasks and experiences. As we 
look back upon them our hearts are filled with gratitude for 
the results of their work. A clean blooded, land-loving thrifty 
race, through their activities they escaped from the poverty of 
their beginnings and attained unto an almost ideal abundance 
of the primal needs of civilization. Their physical condition 
became probably as good as that of any other village com- 
munity in the world. Their experiences stimulated their in- 
tellectual life into full activity, and they bore their full share 
in the wonderful work which Connecticut has done in the 
world. In all critical times in both State and Nation, the sons 
of New Milford, both native and adopted, have been very 
active and influential and one of them, Roger Sherman, per- 
formed a work which will last as long as this nation shah 
continue to be free and independent or as long as the Consti- 
tution of the United States shall endure. 

We know that the past two hundred years are but the 
beginning of a long history of this town. We believe that as 
the years roll by, at the close of each century of its life, the 
events of this day will be repeated here. What will be the lot 
of those who stand here, one, two, three and four hundred 
years hence, to recall the origin and history of this town, we 
cannot conceive. Our hope is that it will be as peaceful, as 
prosperous, and as contented, as our own. 

Whatever it shall be, we expect that their desire to know 
what can be known of that long vanished world, in which both 
present and future have their roots, will lead them to examine 
the memorial of what is said and done here to-day. We are 
not more sure that the Housatonic will then be flowing than 
that they will share with us in afifectionate interest in what 
has gone before. 



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LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 



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